RE: salary idea

I am with Matt on finding the gems out there. My boss says I'm like the pinchhitter in the ninth inning of the world series, but everyone at the office knows it's just about time to go out and find another DBA with a similar skill set to my own, ( I know, I'm always preaching to have differing skill sets in your DBA team, but it's time to clone me, darn-it! :))
I am still stressed by the idea of interviewing someone and finding out they can "talk the talk" but not "walk the walk", even after going through the long list of initial interviews to find the senior candidates.
My company is willing to pay the salary to the right person. Finding the gem among the "rocks" is the hard part, so I guess I don't see the competition when looking for a job that significant as well when you reach the senior level.
I also agree that years of experience is not the same as years of quality DBA work. I left a position after five months of twiddling my thumbs- wasn't doing the company any good and definitely nothing for my career!
Now- any of you guys out in the east need a job and willing to relocate- have you checked out the Denver area? Good jobs, 300 days of sunshine a year with the mountains? How could you go wrong?? Really, our winters are NOT that bad, (visualizing Colorado DBA's promptly sending me emails telling me to shut up and not tell!) :)

We’re a company whose business is driving efficiency in the database tier through software – and what we’ve found is that people have cut so deep already, there’s nothing left to cut, and they’re actually turning to software like ours just so they can keep up with the business obligations they have. These people want to automate, but not so they can reduce the number of DBAs, just so they can keep their heads above water.
I think there is an increasing demand, as lots of organizations that put projects on hold in 2009 are starting to execute on them in 2010, and accordingly not only do a lot of shops only have enough team to keep the lights on today, but they are scrambling to do all of the upgrades, refreshes, migrations, new app deployments that didn’t get done in 2009. I have lots of customers that are trying to hire, and I’m a firm believer that no matter how bad the economy gets, the really top-notch folks are hard to find.
Matt

If that is the case and perhaps it is it can only mean that demand is increasing and supply is decreasing, or we are seeing inflation. Since I believe we are currently in a deflationary cycle the latter is not likely. If salaries are on the rise I would not expect that to hold true for long. For one, there are still many areas of our profession that can still be commoditized and there are now and will continue to be financial pressures from the economy to continue to cut costs and to drive out inefficiency. Think Oracle doesn't have plans to manage your databases? Just because they can't do it today don't think they won't be able to someday and that they don't have bright people thinking about how to do it. What is going to drive all this is the struggling economy which I believe is going to continue for many years to come. The other issue is the economy, there is no real recovery (my opinion) and we are headed into many years of trouble. This means less
spending in all non governmental sectors, less investment and high unemployment. That is lower demand and higher supply. All of this is going to add up to lower salaries in the future. If salaries do go higher it will be when inflation eventually kicks in and your buying power will not be any higher.

Fun conversation, hopefully I did not stray too much off topic. I have been studying economics for the past couple years as a hobby. If any of this interests you and you are looking for one good blogger to read on this subject I would recommend Mish Shedlock (just google Mish). There is also a good Google Talk by Mish on youtube.